Return to Saussure

“It is curious to note that for centuries, in Europe, the words of a madman were either totally ignored or else were taken as words of truth. They either fell into a void - rejected the moment they were proffered -or else men deciphered in them a naive or cunning reason, rationality more rational than that of a rational man.” -           Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language “There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body”. -           Derrida, Of grammatology 1. Nothing or Truth At the beginning of The Order of Discourse , Michel Foucault describes a curious fate that befell the words of the madman in Europe. For centuries, he writes, they were “either totally ignored or else were taken as words of truth.” They...

Derrida & Foucault in Roy's Style. AI image I. The Words We Think We Understand Self. Subject. Freedom. Truth. Human. Reason. Normal. These are words we use constantly, and precisely for that reason they can seem transparent. We hear self and think we know what it refers to; we hear freedom and assume that its meaning is already clear. The familiarity of the vocabulary makes the concepts behind it easy to overlook. But familiarity is not the same as transparency. A useful interruption is therefore: What makes this word mean what it seems to mean? The mistake is to treat the term as the starting point of the analysis. Instead of beginning with What is the self? , we can ask a different question: How did this particular idea of the self become intelligible to us? The shift may seem small, but it changes what we are looking for. Rather than taking the concept as a fixed point and building an argument from it, we investigate the conditions that make a particular ...

I. What Do We Mean by “Subject”? Questioning the subject became one of the central concerns of twentieth-century philosophy. But there seems to be an obvious problem with this move when we turn to human rights. Modern ideas of freedom, responsibility, and human rights seem to require someone who possesses them. Rights belong to people; people act, choose, suffer, speak, and take responsibility for what they do. Behind these actions, we tend to imagine a stable individual: the human being as the subject of experience, activity, responsibility, and freedom. So what happens if philosophy begins to question the subject itself? The question can sound almost absurd. If there is no stable subject, who is left to have rights? If there is no fixed human essence, on what basis can we speak of universal human rights at all? This is essentially the problem put to Jacques Derrida in an interview devoted to the “deconstruction of the subject.” The interviewer asks whether the subject whose...

I. The Problem of the Outside What happens when a philosophical problem becomes an object? Philosophy has always made use of images, analogies, diagrams, and things. Plato gives us a cave, Descartes a piece of wax, Wittgenstein a beetle in a box. Such devices are often treated as aids to understanding, ways of giving an abstract argument a concrete form. Yet some philosophical images do more than illustrate: they put a problem into a form that makes the distinction itself difficult to maintain. This becomes particularly striking when the problem concerns an inside and an outside. Philosophy has repeatedly sought a position from which what is ordinarily taken for granted can be examined. To understand a system, one might imagine that one must somehow step outside it; to identify the conditions governing thought, one might seem to require a standpoint not governed by those same conditions. But what if the thinker is already situated within the language, history, culture, or c...